ABSTRACT
The city has long played a foundational role in western culture’s performances of myth, justice, and power. The ancient Sumerian city later garnered poetic fame as its quasi-mythic king Gilgamesh starred in the world’s oldest extant epic. Tribal blood feuds, with their clannish infanticidal or matricidal acts and endless acts of revenge, must be replaced, sublimated into the progressive Athenian vision of civilization. Western literature’s visions of paradise or the infernal are deeply interwoven with theatrical visions of the city. The theological significance of cities is hardly restricted to monotheistic or western traditions. Buddhism, though associated with Thai forest monasteries, Tibetan mountains, and Indian deer parks, flourished through its dissemination in cities, as Hinduism had already thrived on the populated banks of the Ganges. Secular modern thought often examines cities as microcosms that stage civilization’s political or psychological ills.
